Case study, our own site
One of our own sites: 11 of 22 pages indexed four days after launch
This site is one of a set of lead-generation sites we build and run for ourselves, each on exactly the method a client account gets. On one of them, a 22-page site, Search Console showed 11 pages indexed four days after launch. That is the only claim on this page, and it is a small one: indexing is the first step, not a result. It is here because it is the cleanest evidence available that the technical baseline works, and because a company that sells a method ought to be able to show the method running on something it owns, with nothing to hide behind.
Written by Daniel Stoychev, who built it. Figures from Search Console's Pages report.
22
pages in the sitemap at launch
11
indexed on day four, per Search Console
0
pages in the sitemap that were noindex or redirected
1
Search Console property, created before launch
The baseline
What was in place on day one, so Google had nothing to work out
None of this is special. It is the list every site we build or take over is held to, and it is the list that most sites we audit are missing half of. Half of a new site indexed in four days is what happens when the list is complete before the site is live rather than after.
One page per real search
Twenty-two pages because there were twenty-two distinct things people search for, not because twenty-two looked like a site. No two pages answer the same question; our own similarity check between pages runs before every deploy.
A sitemap Google can trust
Only indexable URLs listed, each with the date its own content last changed rather than the build time. Legal pages are noindex and left out, so the file contains nothing Google will reject.
Crawlers let in, by name
robots.txt allows Google and the AI crawlers explicitly. Nothing the crawler needs sits behind a script; every page is complete HTML before any JavaScript runs.
Structured data that is true
Organisation, service, FAQ and article markup where the page really is that thing, validated in Google's tool, with one canonical per page pointing at itself.
Speed and accessibility as gates
Largest contentful paint under 2.5 seconds on a phone and Lighthouse accessibility at 100 on the home and pricing pages, or the site does not go live. Security headers on every response.
Measurement before launch
The Search Console property existed before the first visitor, so day one has data and day four can be read, and the sitemap was submitted through it rather than left for Google to find.
Why we do it to ourselves first
A method you only run on clients is a method you never see fail
Running the same baseline, the same gates and the same monthly routine on sites we own means every mistake in the method turns up on our own Search Console first. When a title pattern does not get clicked, we see it on a site where changing it costs nobody anything. When a page type stays out of the index, we find out why before a client pays for the same page type.
It also keeps the claims on this site honest in a specific way. The technical checks on the technical SEO page are not a list we recommend; they are the list this site itself passed before it went live, and you can run most of them against it in a browser now.
Not claimed
Indexed in four days is where the work starts
This page does not say the site ranks, has clicks or has produced an enquiry. Eleven pages in the index on day four says the structure was right; what those pages do over the next six months is a different set of numbers, read monthly and judged at month six like any client account. The other eleven pages were expected to follow as Google recrawled, and that expectation is stated as one, not reported as done.
For a client site the same baseline is week one of the retainer, set out on the how it works page and included in month one of every tier on the pricing page. The air-conditioning case is what it looks like when the baseline is applied to a site that was already losing pages.
Find out which of these your site is missing
Send the address. The free check runs the same baseline against your site, lists what is missing in the order it matters, and comes back within one working day with a quote from the price list.